Classical romantic music composers biographies

Classical music composers a-z

From the year to around , Western Classical Music was defined by its soaring melodies and ever-expanding orchestras, its originality and self-expression. Here are the composers who made it all happen. The Romantic period. Fast-forward to the turn of the century, and music was looking wildly different to how it did in the Classical era The Late Romantics, composers like Rachmaninov and Mahler , were expanding the orchestra to unprecedented proportions, adding more colours and instruments and turning music into a vehicle to express the full spectrum of human emotion — from sorrow to joy, passion to grief.

Read more: 30 of the greatest classical music composers of all time. The piano went through significant changes during the 19th century as composers grew more ambitious in range, colours and dynamics. It became a symbol of Romanticism and was enlarged to suit the needs of music-makers like Chopin. The undisputed King of Italian opera , Verdi is known primarily — along with his monumental Requiem — for his great stage works La traviata, Rigoletto, Nabucco, Aida, La forza del destino, Il trovatore.

To Italy in the 19th century, Verdi was a musical monarch, and his death in brought grief to a national population who connected deeply with the passion of his operas. Wagner, a rather controversial character mostly because of his association with Nazism — more on that in our fact gallery here — was a musical visionary known primarily for his operas.

Fanny Mendelssohn was a truly great composer, but getting her work published in the 19th century was an almost overwhelming ordeal.

Composers of classical period 1750 to 1820

Overall, Fanny wrote pieces of music including many Songs without Words , a genre of piano music for which her brother, Felix Mendelssohn, became famous. Musicologists now believe Fanny pioneered this form. Tchaikovsky is one of the most successful composers Russia has ever produced. Tchaikovsky was also a deeply troubled man, and his works were shaped by the emotional consequences of his disastrous marriage, multiple amorous liaisons and homosexuality, which was illegal in Russia at the time.